


My Only Sunshine: Shut Up and Kiss Me

by yodelingintothevoid



Series: My Only Sunshine [2]
Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: F/M, Fighting, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, No Spoilers, Slap Slap Kiss, UST, Unspecified Time, excerpt, so kind of an everybody lives?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-01
Packaged: 2018-05-24 02:45:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6138663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yodelingintothevoid/pseuds/yodelingintothevoid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Yao is having a horrible day. And it's going to get worse before it gets better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Only Sunshine: Shut Up and Kiss Me

Sam Yao’s hollow breathing echoed off the walls of his tiny coms shack. He was pacing in tight circles, mashing his hands together as he muttered in rage until his foot caught a small stack of trash that had accumulated by his table and he stumbled heavily against the wall. With a yell of frustration, he turned on the pile, violently kicking it back under the table. He sat down quickly on the ragged futon and buried his face in his hands.

The fight had been short and colorful, but it had a long history. Sam’s patience had already been thoroughly strung out by the time the fight with Five had even begun.

It had all started that morning, when Maxine first approached him about the run to the East. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It was a ridiculous project, one which neither Janine nor the Major would ever had approved of. So Maxine had waited until Sam was alone, after both leaders were out of township on other projects, when Sam had been so formally and carefully placed in charge of all of the missions until their return. That was the moment when the doctor had approached him to ask for… Ah, he didn’t even know what it was. Some stupid, impossible drug nearly 20 kilometers to the east. Some tiny place she had remembered lately where some of the drug might be found.

It did not have the markings of a particularly dangerous mission, but it was a long one, and Sam was trying to keep his runners close to home until someone else returned to take over. But Dr. Myers seemed hell-bent on making it as dangerous as possible. She insisted only one runner make the trip, because “discretion in this is so important, Sam” she had pleaded in her soft voice.

This was not a life-saving drug, he knew. Just something she needed for her experiments in her lab, which were hardly time sensitive.

Sam had told her about the horde. The massive horde, so far-reaching that it was actually uncountable, and had already turned three runners back home this week alone, one with a badly damaged leg. Who knew where it had come from? Some fire must have started in the city again, driving hundreds out before it. These things happened. But the result of it was that the runners were playing it safe, and now Dr. Myers was demanding a mission: a long mission, a secret mission, a stupid, moronic, waste of time mission.

And then she insisted on Runner Five.

Yes, to run this mission, Dr. Maxine Myers had laid claim to Sam’s best, strongest, toughest, cleverest, most valuable and most UNFATHOMABLY stubborn pet runner and insisted that it be no one else.

Of course Sam had protested, of course he had explained that he was in charge, that it was a suicide mission, that surely Maxine was too humane to wish the death of Runner Five, but had she listened??

After an hour long fight, Maxine had actually had the gall to contact the Major, WITHOUT informing him, and got private permission to send out Five, alone, into the biggest horde Sam had seen since the rise of the Grey Death.

So yes, Sam was already outraged that morning as he summoned Five to brief her about the mission, but he had anticipated, of course, that the runner would take his side. With all of her usual stoicism, Five had listened calmly to her orders, nodded once, and said “I’ll do it”. The more Sam protested, the more silent and determined she became, and the more apparently amused Maxine was. Then his runner was gone, without even a goodbye.

Dr. Meyers sat in the coms station with him until Five reached the tiny pharmacy. The room was tense, with a tension only achievable by two calm, stubborn people driven to rage by each other’s company. Little was spoken until Five, with her usual superhuman efficiency, retrieved the package and began her return home.  
And that was when, THAT was when, Maxine had the nerve to turn on Sam and begin to mock him for how he was handling the whole affair. She started asking all these penetrating questions about Five, raising her eyebrows and smirking, even beginning to imply that Sam was somehow acting TOO CONCERNED about the fate of his best runner, asking him if there was something she needed to know about their relationship, even going so far as to insinuate that his emotions might not even be stable enough for him to be placed in charge.

That battle had escalated to the point where Maxine had left the coms shack in a hurry, and it was only after all of this, as Sam sat stewing and alone at his microphone, that the fight with Five herself had begun.

It was stupid now, how it had started. Even if Five had been in range, Janine’s cameras had been inactive since the night the horde had first appeared, but Sam didn’t need visuals to know when she was beginning to enter the horde itself. The sounds were incredible. Five got audibly scared, for almost the first time since he’d known her, and she began talking about finding a place to wait out the night. Risking her life by trying to SLEEP outside the township! In the middle of a record horde, on a freezing cold night! No, it was unacceptable, he needed her home, and he told her so, and… oh, he didn’t remember how it all went until the moment she snapped out that, yes, she would risk her own neck by coming straight home and pushing her already exhausted body while carting this massive box of drugs and fighting off Earth’s largest zombie swarm with a bat, but she’d be hanged if she had to listen to his arguing while she did it, and then.

Then.

She turned off her headset.

Sam pushed his hands furiously through his hair and then mashed them together, trembling. His body was so full of rage and fear, helplessness and anxiety, that he was sure his muscles were aching worse than hers.

So he stayed in the coms shack, volume turned all the way up on his headset, desperately waiting for a sound, any sound, to come from her. He sprang up again and paced in narrow circles, feeling the cold settling in to his body more and more with every moment of empty static  
.  
How would they even know? At this point, when would be the moment his anxiety would cease, the moment they could know for sure that she was dead, that she had been changed, that she was never again going to stumble through the gates, shooting him a weary smile…

His legs finally gave out on the futon again and he sat still, shocked at the way his throat was closing up, shocked at the burning dryness in his eyes, and for the first time, he wondered about himself.

There was something Five had told him once, a quote she had from her trainer back at Mullins. She said she used it when she got scared out in the field. “When you’re out of options, get low, get still, and feel for your heartbeat. As long as you’ve got that, you’ve got something left to give.”

Sam ducked his head down under his arms and sat very still. Opening his mouth, he breathed evenly, trying to slow his heartbeat, trying to beat his way out through the thick trudge of time itself. Hours crawled through him as the sun sank low and he told himself that she had changed her mind, that she had found a safe place to sleep, that she had gone to a neighboring township…

Someone came to summon him to dinner and he waved them off, feeling nauseated. Five wasn’t just his best runner. She had become his best friend as well. How many times had they saved each other’s lives? How many times had he heard her hoarsely whispering his name through the headset and jumped on to guide her through the swarms? How many times had she found and smuggled some small contraband item to him, slipping it in his fingers under the mess table with a smile?

 

He had become used to her creeping quietly into the shack in the early morning, eyes bruised by nightmares, to curl up on the futon and catch a few last hours of sleep protected by the hum of his voice. He had become used to lazily watching her on the training grounds during the duller parts of his day, smiling out the window as he watched her form and speed noticeably improve each week. He had become used to her intimacy, as the whole township now viewed her as some superheroic badass and only he was granted the image of her as she was: her messy hair when she woke up, her whispered conversations during township meetings, her secret gentleness with the kids who followed her everywhere she went.

Yet still he had treated her like a child, and let his anger at the doctor spill over onto her, risked her life with his petulance. She trusted him, and he had abandoned her.

It was well dark, and Abel had quieted when he heard a shout from the wall. His breath had sunk low and shallow, but the sound went through him like an electric charge. He sprang up, cheeks flooded with red, and heart springing forward again in both anger and hope renewed, and he flung off the buzzing headset and ran from the room. The soldiers were shouting and the gate was scraping open, floodlights pouring out on the lurching figures of zombs wandering outside the gate. Gunfire picked them off, but Sam saw nothing else as he staggered down from his shack, nothing in the blinding light but dark figures tumbling back under the wave of bullets.

She appeared almost supernaturally in their midst, still running, her pack in one hand, a bloody bat in the other. She was keeping her head down amongst the bullets, running sure and smooth towards the gates, and they started closing as she stumbled through them, shutting off the last of the trailing horde.

“Five…” Sam was rattling, shaking, empty with relief. He moved towards her, the camp deserted, the soldiers struggling with the gate, but she didn’t stop running. She dropped her pack and then her weapon as she came up the hill to him, her face set and eyes blazing. He stumbled to a halt, suddenly worried, remembering everything he had said that day in his anger. He wondered what she would say, and how much she would hate him and he tried to steel himself, to remind himself that he deserved it, that he had lost control, but he wasn’t sure if he was ready for her to walk away from him, to end the friendship over this, to go back to nothing more than coworkers…

“Five…” he fumbled out again, and then she was on him, her body crashing into his, smelling of musk and copper, and her dirty hands were in his hair, fierce, and her wet mouth was on his, gentle and slow. He stumbled back and caught at her, at the warm, beating life of her, and he gasped and kissed her back, hungry and desperate, his emptiness filling. She said nothing, just continued to kiss him, pushing up on her toes against the hill, her fiery breaths slowing and calming against his lips, her heartbeat slowing and stuttering on his chest. Then she stopped, burying her face abruptly in his shoulder. “Don’t you ever,” she gasped, struggling to control her lungs, “talk to me that way again.”

Sam slid his face down to her shoulder and squeezed his arms as tightly around her as he could. “Five,” he whispered. “I thought you were dead. I thought I killed you. I – I just about lost my mind.”

Dr. Maxine Myers began a slow walk from the hospital to the gate. She observed Five’s fingers, still slick with zombie blood, pulling at Sam’s hair and neck. “Well,” she hummed to herself. “I guess we’ll have to sanitize both of them tonight.”

**Author's Note:**

> This work is a one-shot excerpt from the longer Sam/Five work My Only Sunshine. Go to the series to read the complete work!


End file.
